To Beat Kent Farrington, You Have to Stop Riding Like Him
Catch the latest from The Horse Show on ClipMyHorse.TV, with expert analysis of Traverse City and more.
Published
17 SEP 2026
Est. reading time
4 min
Major League Show Jumping sold Saturday in Traverse City as a duel. Shane Sweetnam arriving off the win in Toronto a week earlier and chasing a third Grand Prix at Flintfields. Kent Farrington defending the one he won last year. Two riders who know the ring, know the ground, know each other.
Five went to the jump-off. Neither of them won it.
What decided the class was not better riding. It was a different kind of riding, and the distinction matters more than the result.
Nina Mallevaey and My Clementine went third, with both of them still to come. No target on the board worth chasing, no way of knowing what would be needed. She rode as if she already knew.
The moment that decided the class came at the oxer after the combination. The orthodox line is to drift out before the approach and prepare the landing on the inside, so you can attack the next fence off the turn rather than through it. It is what Farrington does, and it is why he is systematically faster than nearly any rider on the planet. Mallevaey did not drift. She stayed inside, landed, and turned. She was tight enough to catch the wing.
"This is the point where I normally praise Kent," Joe Clee said on this week's edition of The Horse Show, watching the round back. "He goes to the outside to come to the inside. She stayed on the inside and landed and got inside. She took all the risks."
Hero or zero, as Clee put it. On Saturday it was hero.
Sweetnam went next with James Kann Cruz and, for a while, looked like the answer. He had won Leg 1 in Toronto seven days earlier with a different horse, and he came into the ring as the man in form. "I thought actually, it was done," Clee said. "He rode a fantastic round, fast everywhere. Maybe one too many strides to the third oxer, but for the rest he blew the course away." The turn back to the vertical drew the loudest reaction in the studio, seven strides where most would need eight. It was not enough.
Which left Farrington and Greya, last to go, with everything in front of them. He knew the time. He knew the line. He is the most precise rider of his generation and this is exactly the situation his method is built for.
One tenth of a second.
That margin is the whole argument. Farrington's approach is not a weakness, it is the best sustained method in the sport. He builds a plan and executes it, week after week, with a margin of error most riders cannot afford to shave. The turns are engineered rather than improvised. He rarely loses time because he rarely needs to gamble to make it up.
But a method built to remove risk cannot manufacture a tenth of a second on demand. Beating him is not a question of riding better, because he rides well every time. It is a question of being willing to do something he will not do, and being right about it.
Mallevaey did not find her tenth through polish. She found it by accepting a chance of failure that Farrington's riding is designed to eliminate, and she found it before she knew whether she would need it.
The tell came at the finish. Mallevaey is not a demonstrative rider, and the usual picture is a smile and a pat on the neck. What the cameras caught instead was closer to disbelief. Whatever she had calculated on that turn, the result of it seems to have surprised her too.
It is worth saying that this was not a breakthrough. My Clementine has been produced quietly, in the shadow of the horses that carried Mallevaey's name first, and the win makes her a double five-star Grand Prix winner. A rider who takes horses already jumping well and turns them into horses that win is not lucky twice.
Which leaves the uncomfortable part.
Farrington lost the Grand Prix and left Traverse City at the top of the individual standings. Points from the qualifier, a clear in the team competition, and a second place carrying the Grand Prix multiplier. Mallevaey won the class and sits third. Team KPF, Farrington's team, moved into the lead.
There is nothing wrong with that arithmetic. A season-long league should reward the rider who is there every week rather than the rider who is brilliant once. But it does mean the format quietly favours the method Mallevaey had to abandon in order to beat it.
Seven legs left. Whether consistency or nerve is the better route through a Major League Show Jumping season is not settled yet, and Traverse City just made the question sharper.
Produced by The Horse Show, your weekly showjumping program on ClipMyHorse.TV. Free to watch, live or from the archive.
Also on this week's show: Ben Maher, a day after winning the CP International, on riding a Grand Prix with a shoulder he could barely lift, and why he did not love Saturday's Nations Cup course at Spruce Meadows. Joe Clee and Niels Bruynseels break down the jump-off that ended Richard Vogel's Grand Slam bid. And why Katie Laurie reaching that jump-off was less of an accident than the scoreboard suggested.
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